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Comment by barrell | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of people who _thrive_ off of a 100% beef diet, I don’t think there is anyone who could _survive_ off of 100% beyond meat burgers. I don’t think you can say they are way healthier than beef by any stretch of the imagination.

And to extract pure protein from a pea is exactly what I would consider ultra-processed. The checmicals used to separate the protein from the pea are included in the final product. At its purest, you’re at least drenching it in HCl. At its worst, it’s being soaked with who knows what.

Sure maybe it’s cleaned well enough to “not matter” but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that a concern and not want to consume it.

And that’s just pea protein, I don’t even want to know the aggregate of all the ingredients and manufacturing process of the “patties”.

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See that's the same thought the agrolobby used to weaponize "chemical-sounding", scary names. HCl is the same your stomach uses to digest food and used in making e.g. "organic" sea salt.

I see the same argument very often these days: that only single-ingredient, "traditional" food is good.

What is this about “the agrolobby”? I haven’t eaten processed foods in decades. I started when I was a kid because I didn’t like eating things where I didn’t know all the ingredients. Not from marketing or lobbying or trends. I just stopped eating processed foods, felt better, and now if I eat any processed foods I get ill, so I don’t eat them.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t eat processed foods because of marketing or advertising or lobbying they’ve been exposed to. There is a solid rational to eat whole foods, and anyone I know who does not eat processed foods does it because they’d rather eat whole foods.

There is a ton of research to suggest processed foods are safe to eat. One could also make the argument these are all funded by their own lobbying groups. The truth of the matter is nutrition is complicated, there is likely more than one answer, and we definitely do not know them.

Not everyone who disagreed has been swindled by some corporation.

HCl is toxic when ingested btw. The fact it is in your body does not mean it’s safe to consume.

My point was there is very much this kind of "whispering propaganda" when it came to vegan food, labeling it as unhealthy, "processed" and full of chemicals. Most of it was and is done by the "agrolobby", sometimes subtly, sometimes not, e.g. through full-page ads in the NYT, laying out scary-sounding chemical ingredients. The agriculture sector collectively shat its pants when something came along for the first time in centuries that could even slightly change consumer habits.

This is not contending with the health aspects of it though. It is highly processed and it uses a bunch of toxic chemicals to make it, regardless of what any lobbying groups say.

These are the people who argue that soymilk and seed oils are healthy. Even if they're processed with using solvents such as hexane and stuff it's just processing, right? Your also "processing" when you peal your potatoes. Same thing !

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